Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok was more of a rest stop between trips, so we didn't plan much touristing. It was also pretty hot (35C) so we didn't want to spend all day outside.

Our hotel is in the business district, with direct access to a BTS stop. It was easy to catch a skytrain (60¢) to the river, and then by ferry ($1.60) to the historical area where most of the tourist sites are located.

We went first to see the 50m gold reclining Buddha in Wat Pho. The buildings were pretty ornate and very bright and colourful. There was a big difference in tourism numbers between Myanmar and Thailand - in Yangon we had a similar site to ourselves, here I queued to get the right position for a picture. And forget about tourist-free pictures - here the main objective was not getting my eye poked out from a selfie stick.

Unfortunately the feet of Buddha were undergoing restoration, as the inscriptions on the soles are the coolest part. Still, a 50m long gold Buddha is pretty impressive. The interior of the building housing Buddha was also cool, with murals and carvings filling the walls and ceiling.

We then wandered through random streets to the flower market, about 2km away. Our wandering wasn't completely random thanks to the offline maps and GPS (I'm using tripadvisor for offline maps).

Along the way we stopped in a local restaurant that served bbq'd pork. The chef was chopping the pork in the front and they had the biggest rice cooker I've ever seen (about 3' diameter). Anyways it looked like their specialty was rice with bbq'd pork, so we had an order each. It was delicious. Although, and I've said this before, we're spoiled for food choices in Toronto because it's easy to get similar quality back home.

Continued walking and sampled some more streetfood, pork satays right from the grill, and a fried dough bite-sized treat filled with condensed milk, corn and green onion. We really enjoyed our little walk, as it was largely tourist-free.

The flower market was huge. There's a festival tonight where people float elaborate flower offerings on the river, so it was busier than usual; but it's busy every day. The flower vendors filled up the sidewalks and spilled out into the streets.

We caught the river ferry back home, with some difficulty in finding the port.

We cleaned up and went for happy hour in the hotel lounge on the 32nd floor. Being city folk, there was something comforting about seeing major streets filled with car lights.

Later we checked out the night market a couple skytrain stops down from us. The sidewalks were just filling up with vendors (we had lucky timing as it poured rain before and after we went out). They had pretty decent quality stuff (per Heather).

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The next day was similar, just different sites.
We went only to see the Grand Palace today, which is the top tourist site in Bangkok. It houses the Emerald Buddha (actually made from jade), but today was the ceremony to switch from summer to winter clothes so that particular temple was closed.

We were almost crushed by the busloads of tourists, with almost all of them waving selfie sticks about. We must have hit a wave of them when we first arrived because there was no room to move, but after a while it got a bit better.

Despite the overwhelming number of tourists it was still cool to see, even more colourful and grander and elaborate than Wat Pho.

On the way back to the ferry we passed through the Amulet Market. They sell little amulets (duh) to collectors that search through the tables filled with little Buddha heads and other designs, peering through magnifying glasses for a rare find. It was interesting to see.

We had an early morning flight to Paro the next day (wake up call at 3:30am) so took it easy after dinner and just went to bed.